Evan Narcisse

I knew I wasn't going to get any real details about Infamous: Second Son out of Sucker Punch's Nate Fox. But I've been a big fan of the open-world PS3 exclusives, especially because their take on superhero action makes great use of the tight thematic bond that a superhero has with his city.

Lots of questions swirled in my head after watch Fox introduce the first-ever look at the game but I tracked him down to ask a single one: which Infamous 2 ending was canon? Spoilers follow:

Today, in an event in New York, a PlayStation 4 event revealed a new, exclusive game by Sucker…
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Infamous 2 has two finales, depending on how ruthless or altruistic you played lead character Cole McGrath. The good ending has Cole offering up the ultimate sacrifice and leaves only a few other superpowered folks like him in existence. The more surprising bad ending has Cole killing his best friend and confidant, in a move that spawns hundreds more metahuman Conduits. The bad ending felt like a riff on concepts played out in Marvel's X-Men and seemed like a more fertile springboard for a sequel.

At first, Second Son looked like it had to be following up on Infamous 2's good ending. As Fox stammered a nervous non-response, I speculated that you couldn't have an all-seeing totalitarian regime clamping down on Seattle in a universe full of powered-up people. More stammering from Fox. How do you subjugate superheroes with conventional police forces? The good ending had to be canon…

Unless it was the super-powered elite doing the oppressing. Normal folks wouldn't be able to offer up any real resistance and the people in charge would want to monitor the population to keep track of and control any new person with special abilities. All those Conduits spawned by Cole could turn out to be villainous, especially if this is a game that spins out of the bad ending. So neither possibility could be ruled out. Fox at this point was politely letting me spin my theories as his co-workers waited for him nearby. No smile or smirk as I talked. No hint that I was on the right path. So, we'll have to wait a little longer to see which ending winds up setting the precedent for the next Infamous game. But the possibilities of a bad ending being canon feels far more interesting to me.